"I notice he didn't(or couldn't) name an American player who went to Japan to play and learned Japanese."
Tuffy Rhodes speaks Japanese well, but then again, he has spent more than a decade there.
There have been others who stayed at least a few years and learned at least a decent amount of the Japanese language. (I ought to know as I heard them on TV.)
Don't be fooled by the fact that certain Japanese players like Ichiro Suzuki or Hideki Matsui don't speak English in interviews. They know at least a fair amount of English, but generally don't want to speak it on camera because they aren't fluent. (I heard Ichiro speak English to some of his teammates several years ago during an MLB All-Star tour of Japan and he didn't sound too bad.)
Shigetoshi Hasegawa, who had a pretty good career in MLB as a reliever, speaks English very well, and appeared on some English language programs in Japan when I was there.
I think jaxvid has a good point. Nippon Professional Baseball only allows four foreign-registered players on the top team roster-it can be a combination of position players and pitchers of 1-3, 2-2, or 3-1. (There is no limit on the number of foreigners that can be on the organizational 70-man roster, though.)
So what happens from time to time is that there is an extra foreigner or two stuck on the farm team simply because of the foreign player limit.
As a matter of fact, NPB actually has a retarded rule that a foreign player who has been there at least 9 years is not counted as one on the roster from the start of his 10th season. (This has been the case with Tuffy Rhodes for the past couple of seasons, and I think it will impact Alex Ramirez with the Tokyo Giants from next year.)
I believe the reasoning behind the rule was that a few decades ago there were some players from other Asian countries who lived in Japan and played their entire careers there and they didn't want them to always count against the gaijin quota, but I doubt the people who came up with it ever envisioned that a player from the Western Hemisphere would ever stay so long.
I spent some time over the years complaining about issues related to foreign players in NPB in the papers in Japan and on related Internet sites, but it won't change.
And as far as MLB and its never-ending pursuit of foreigners at the expense of American-born players goes, this will become even worse with the changes in visa laws from a couple of years ago that allow MLB teams more visas for minor leaguers.
